See this comment section for context.
Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State:
"Another lesson to be derived is that action does not necessarily mean that the individual is “active” as opposed to “passive,” in the colloquial sense. Action does not necessarily mean that an individual must stop doing what he has been doing and do something else. He also acts, as in the above case, who chooses to continue in his previous course, even though the opportunity to change was open to him."
Saturday, January 29, 2011
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Yes, I was told as much by Lord Keynes of the Social Democracy blog that not acting is itself a choice and itself with consequences, even unintended ones.
ReplyDeleteSo I guess one goes back to what Jonathan said; that one has to understand how the market works and justify the market. That's a harder job, so that leaves a free marketer without an easy copout.
Of course, that easily leads someone to say, "Oh ho, you worship an invisible hand to solve all our problems." So better to act the apolitical skeptic, who is only trying to be convinced by the other's sides argument and criticizing it, than to be the one on the defense.
Wait, how is that passage from Rothbard relevant?
ReplyDeleteThis is in response to both the former thread and your current quote. You stated there:
ReplyDelete"Property rights regimes are coercive insofar as they are incomplete and hereditary."
If you have not read the "Law, Legislation, and Liberty" series or the "Fatal Conceit" I would highly suggest it.
The reason I bring this up is because FAH spends a tremendous amount of time - practically the whole first volume - distinguishing between what is called the "constructive rationalist" approach and the "evolutionary" or "spontaneously emergent" approach. As you noted, Delong just had something along these lines.
In any case, the difference between these two forms of order has an important implication for how we classify something as coercive or not. It is plain silly and non-sensical to classify institutional frameworks which are the outcome of an organic and evolutionary process as coercive, regardless of how "incomplete" we may think they are. They are the product of no single will, no directing factor with any sort of "intention". As Ferguson put it, such rules are the product of human action but not of human design.
Here's a brief example. If a system of walking paths (literally speaking) have spontaneously emerged from other individuals simply taking the fastest way to some destination, but still as of yet have not produced paths to certain other destinations, some of which are regarded as useful, are we to proclaim that system coercive? Of course not, that sounds silly. No will is directing the system. Whether or not it is incomplete by some standard has nothing to do with whether it is "coercive" or "unjust" (note that in the second volume FAH analyzes the various words in our language that have arisen to describe such contradictory and non-sensical notions).
The word coercive only has substantive mean with the latter kind of order; i.e. deliberate design. It does make sense to say someone, or a group, has been coerced if the rule to which they are subject is the product of a "directed will". That is why it is more than legitimate to describe the various taxes and regulations that emanate from Congress as coercive.
I should also not that this addresses the somewhat bizarre point you're making with the Murray Rothbard quote. It does not make sense to think of the enitity that is the "whole group" of people who interact within a spontaneously formed institutional framework as "acting" in any reasonable sense of the word. Read the beginning of MES and you'll see that he makes sure to emphasize that characterizing spontanously emergent wholes like individual people is a grave error.
Jonathan -
ReplyDeleteWhat we normally think of as refraining from action is action as well. It is purposeful and towards an end. Is that purpose and that end justified? It should be justifiable as surely as any other action.
EdP -
Well certainly they're very different orders. I'm well aware of the "by human action but not human design" distinction... I'm not sure it's the best way of putting it. It is still by human design, but as you say - no single human design and it is multiple designs interacting and changing each other over time. I'm not sure how that changes my premise. I can think of lots of coercive emergent phenomena. I think the nature of the order says more about the durability of the order than it does about the coerciveness of the order.
I've never contested the idea that the taxes and regulations that emanate from Congress are coercive. I don't think they're theft - I don't think they're unethical coercion. But I've always said they are coercive.
Your last paragraph is attributing a claim to me that I have not made. Institutions do not act - humans act. Humans do act in concert with each individual acting on certain expectations of how others act. Humans do select agents to act on their behalf. For these reasons I don't get especially bothered when people say "the government does X". But it was certainly not new informatino when I read Rothbard that humans act, not institutions.
The great advantage of spontaneous order is that it is robust - not that it has any particular ethical quality.
ReplyDelete